Masterpiece

It’s time for my Midweek Recommendation, in which I commend to your attention books or music or movies or anything I find worth recommending.

All right, for my midweek recommendation this week, I don’t have much to say. In fact, my fundamental message to you can be summed up pretty simply, as follows:

Masterpiece. Watch it.

I grew up in a house that watched a lot of Mystery!, and now that this has been subsumed under the Masterpiece heading, I can doubly recommend Masterpiece to you, because while I like and enjoy Masterpiece, I love and adore Mystery!

I would try to list all the shows I have fallen in love with through both Mystery! and Masterpiece over the years, but I am deathly afraid of leaving something awesome out and feeling stupid about it later. So, I won’t. I’ll only say that you should watch Masterpiece because virtually anything that shows up on it is likely to be far superior than the vast majority of American TV. Period. Great writing, strong acting, good stories. Food for the mind.

So, while there are occasional misfires, (Hetty Wainthrop, I’m thinking of you – though you weren’t a complete disaster, since I first saw Dominic Monaghan on your misbegotten show, before I ever saw him as Merry in LOTR or as Charlie on Lost), in general, Masterpiece delivers superior TV on a regular basis. So I say again…